Connecting Marketing Automation With ERP

How would marketing benefit from a greater connection to your end customer data? You can probably think of a couple of different use cases in which this may be beneficial. By connecting marketing automation with ERP software your business can begin exploring how these kinds of scenario’s could impact your business. When connecting marketing automation with ERP, your business can effectively share data around sales history, shipping data, and project information.

Marketers are spending more and more time using data to drive decisions and campaigns. A lot of this new data that is being utilized is a conglomeration of analytics and third-party data; however there is a massive treasure trove of data that many organizations are currently leaving untapped. Businesses often forget that the data that exists inside of their ERP can be masively beenficial to other area’s of the business such as; sales, marketing, and customer services. We’ve talked about the benefits of connecting ERP and CRM before, and why this is beneficial. Today we are going to look at one of the most powerful ways businesses are using and connecting marketing automation and ERP software together.

Access To End Customers

The best marketers know that sometimes the best customer is a returning customer. This means ensuring that once your business has captured someone as a customer that retaining them, and influencing them to become a returning customer, can be critical to generating business growth. However, in this day and age, many business are not the direct provider to their customer. This means that direct access to many end customers are not directly known by marketing.

If your customers are placing orders and organizing delivery through a third party, your marketing team likely has very little awareness of what actually is occurring with these customers. Currently, many business will send over meta file describing the activities that have occurred with these third parties, but these offer little in the way of opportunities to actually engage this customer base.

Do you do business on Amazon?

One of the greatest examples of this may be for businesses that do a lot of business through Amazon.com. By connecting marketing automation with ERP software, your business can actually begin leveraging the orders — and customers — acquired through this channel to market new offers, products, and services to these customers.

Imagine that a customer orders your product from Amazon. If your product has a life cycle — by connecting marketing automation with ERP software — you could use their order and contact data to generate a specialized campaign that will remind them when to reorder, offer them promotions, or suggest bulk discounts.

Businesses that generate revenue through Amazon are often doing their marketing departments a massive disservice by not providing them with this important data that likely exists inside of their ERP. By connecting marketing automation with ERP businesses can expect to see their marketing departments offer new content marketing, e-mail, and re-targeting campaigns at customers that would otherwise go nurtured.

If your businesses thrives of repeat customers. This kind of innovation is a no brainer.

Do you offer any kind of service plan?

If your business relies heavily on maintenance, service, or continuous improvement plans it would likely create a wealth of new opportunities if your marketing department had access to your ERP data. By being able to access all orders and customers inside of your ERP system, marketing can ensure that all existing product or service users are marketing your additional services.

Imagine you’re a company that makes knives, and that your product is largely sold through brokers and 3rd party dealers. By connecting marketing automation with ERP, your marketing department can now engage these customers to purchase warranty or service plans that may otherwise not be exposed to the customer. If your broker or dealer isn’t heavily incentivized to push these plans, there’ a good chance that marketing could capitalize on some great opportunities here. However, without access to these orders and customer data, your marketing department will lack the ability to surgically conduct these campaigns.

The bottom line

Connecting marketing automation and ERP software offers a great deal of new marketing and revenue generating opportunities to your business. With the increase of distribution through e-commerce and 3rd party brokers, many businesses are now housing some of the most powerful marketing data imaginable inside of their own ERP system; yet it is left untapped by many.

If your business sells good through a site like Amazon, or utilizes a third-party broker, this kind of data sync could greatly benefit your marketing department. Furthermore, businesses that rely on service and warranty plans to generate additional revenue also may be able to secure significant ROI from integrating these two enterprise software systems.

Every business is unique and may be able to benefit from this integration differently. At Datix, we’re the world leading expert on connecting Epicor ERP with any number of different software systems. We’ve also helped hundreds of businesses connect their ERP systems with other enterprise software. This is what we do. If this is a project you’re currently considering, you should drop us a line. We’ll be happy to share our experiences and information about these kinds of projects with you.